Decadent Resistance takes its name from an essay written by Michael Lithgow for Alex Mackenzie and Oliver Hockenhull’s publication DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts. In his essay Michael explores a dynamic between aesthetics and activism evidenced in West Coast video practice, a tension that defines to some extent one of the compelling qualities of West Coast video art over the past four decades and why it has attracted national and international attention. Decadent Resistance is community-curated media art program that invites programmers and directors of historical and contemporary media arts centres, organizations, and projects to submit video works that exemplify a perspective- an approach- an aesthetic- a position that touches on the tension between aesthetics and politics. Video artwork will be introduced and contextualized by their curator. A panel discussion between all representative will follow the screening.

This Vancouver premiere screening of Adrian Blackwell’s Night Equals Day and Daniel Young and Christian Giroux’s Every Building, Or Site, That a Building Permit Has Been Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006 bring two recent structural approaches to development in Toronto to the West. These two new silent 35mm architectural films form the initial parts of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT)’s “Cinema and Disjunction” commissioning and production support project for critical architectural film works. Drawing inspiration from art historical precedents and contemporary critiques of the urban form, the initial projects presented under this framework defamiliarize and interrupt Toronto’s visual narratives with new questions and alternative possibilities. To express our intent in Bernard Tschumi’s terms, these films “reinscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture.”

Blackwell’s Night Equals Day employs complex camera control to record a day at a single point of Regent Park’s (Canada's oldest public housing development and now the site of significant condominium development) Sackville and Oak streets intersection, compressing a twelve-hour equinox day to thirty minutes of film time, one frame per second, and one three-hundred-and-sixty degree camera rotation per hour. In Young and Giroux’s Every Building, one experiences a comparatively accelerated city represented by one hundred and thirty odd buildings or building sites captured in short static shots. These highly aestheticized images, shot all over Toronto’s boundaries, develop a time-based response to photo-conceptualism’s language of architectural photography, reframing Ruscha within contemporary practice. – Ben Donoghue

Adrian Blackwell is an artist and urbanist whose work focuses on spaces of uneven development in the postfordist city. Daniel Young and Christian Giroux have been collaborating on sculpturally concerned projects since 2003. They are represented in Toronto by Diaz Contemporary.

Young, Giroux, and Blackwell will briefly introduce excerpts of their recent film projects, followed by two short talks investigating the relationship between these moving images and their ongoing investigations of physical space.

Emily Carr University Lecture room, South Building #301. Presented by Emily Carr University 2009 Lecture Series.

An excerpt from David Harvey's The Condition of Post-modernity will be presented for group reading and discussion. Harvey’s answer to Fred Jameson’s Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition is a significant influence on Young, Giroux and Blackwell’s work because of Harvey’s rigorous basis of his analysis of cultural and social change in the economic and his special emphasis on social geography and the production of space.

ONE ROLL. NO SPLICES. SHOOT AND SHOW. This is the mantra of the One Take Super 8 Event. Now in its eighth season, One Take Super 8 has inspired the production of over 400 Super 8 films that were shot on one roll of film and screened without preview or editing, in Regina, Winnipeg, Ft. Lauderdale FL, Montreal, Ottawa, Oberlin OH, and Syracuse NY. Toronto based filmmaker Alex Rogalski, the event’s producer, will perform the projection of 18 selections from the event’s archives. Like other DIY Super 8 Projects, such as Vancouver’s Project8, the One Take Super 8 Event is a celebration of accessible filmmaking, empowered storytelling, and chance genius.

Programmed by Amy KazymerchykPeggy Anne Berton and Marc St. Aubin in person

ScareCity is a cinematic performance that fuses personally archived film and video with live improvised storytelling and music. Berton’s first-person recount of her return home to rural Southwestern Ontario to care for her aging parents meshes with an emotionally charged personal archive of childhood films, a time lapse of subdivision development around her home, country landscapes, and portraits of economic castaways at the local drinking hole. Her poignant reflections on aging and memory transform into metaphors on the dwindling fuel economy, agriculture’s increasingly violent use of antibiotics and pesticides, and the pandemic loss of wild and rural land to urban sprawl. St. Aubin’s original live music score adds lyricism and punctuation to Berton’s memories, often sustaining their emotional reverberations long after their words are uttered.

The Legend of Buck Kelly tracks Berton’s obsession with the late Jeff Buckley across the terrain of her own love life; from New York where she first met him, to her home town of Dawson City where she imagines he went after faking his death. She illustrates the serendipity that linked her to Buckley- from the wilderness to the big city to boy friends with the names Buck and Kelly. www.peggyanneberton.com

Last month I visited The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The exhibit included a retrospective on Miranda July’s Joanie4Jackie Project (formerly Big Miss Moviola). As an independent distribution system and feminist art project Joanie4Jackie invited women filmmakers and video artists to submit their completed works which were then compiled onto a “Chainletter” tape of ten pieces in the order of their arrival. Each artist on a Chainletter tape received a copy of that tape and a corresponding booklet of letters written by the featured artists. In 12years Joanie4Jackie compiled 19 Chainletter tapes and three curated Co-Star tapes. As I stared down into the glass case that housed a decade of the project’s video cassettes, letters, and related ephemera, I felt proud to have contributed my teenage movies to such a monumental exchange, and nostalgic that at 27yrs old something that was so tangible, raw and experiential in my lifetime was already an untouchable museum piece. And yet Big Miss Moviola’s challenge and promise continues to live on in the hearts of everyone who waited patiently for their Chainletter tape in the mail. We have adopted that promise and passed on the challenge to the girls and women that we teach and mentor to make, distribute, and screen their untold stories and dreams. www.joanie4jackie.com – Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk

Who is Bozo Texino? chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous and mythic rail graffiti- a simple sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, “Bozo Texino”-- a drawing seen on railcars for over 80 years. Daniel’s gritty black and white film uncovers a secret society and it’s underground universe of hobo and railworker graffiti, and includes interviews with legendary boxcar artists, Coaltrain, Herby, Colossus of Roads, and The Rambler. Shooting over a 16-year period, Daniel rode freights across the West carrying a Super-8 sound camera and a 16mm Bolex. During his quest he discovered the roots of a folkloric tradition that has gone mostly unnoticed for a century. Taking inspiration from Beat artists Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, the film functions as both a sub-cultural documentary and a stylized fable on wanderlust and outsider identity. “I was drawn to the subject by the universal graffiti impulse and the classic, corny notion of freight train blues escape.” – BD www.billdaniel.net

A rollicking rail zine of freight riding stories, interviews with hoboes and boxcar artists, historical oddities and tons of photos of modern day boxcar tags- known as monikers- the result of a 25year obsession with hobo and railworker folklore presented in the guise of a vintage railroad fanzine.

Sunset Scavenger is an outdoor video installation based on ideas concerning the end of the oil age. It is a collage essay on ecological catastrophe, sustainability, improvisation and self-reliance, featuring hippie houseboaters, punk back-to-the-landers, rubber tramps, off-the-gridders, and desert rats, who are today’s true cultural vanguard. The two-screen video program is projected on the sails of the Sailvan, a 1984 Ford veggie oil-converted diesel van with a 2-masted gaff-rigged schooner that functions as tour vehicle, projection screen and metaphorical emergency escape craft.

The selection of videos in Human Beyond a Cure, offer frank and poignant reflections on living in a culture that is simultaneously preoccupied with self-help and self-destruction. Cam Matamoros’ In Four Years earnestly takes on a practice of goal setting and positive self-talk, while Daniel Barrow’s Artist Statement exposes the meaninglessness of success and art stardom. Both Subtitled and We Belong Together illustrate the inextricable influence of pop culture on our desires for intimacy and connection. Hannah Jickling and Kevin Hegge challenge the hetero-normative status quo in Knee for All, which celebrates the taboo of asexuality and radical desire. Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines #4 makes an unapologetic leap into the quagmire of consumption based ‘healing’ modalities and their aesthetics, and Nina Yuen’s Alison takes us deep into the woods, down deserted highways, and into the psyche of a lost woman. The program’s namesake Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond a Cure strings together a series of uneasy lullabies that neither assuage our fears of the world’s end, nor secure our hope in finding a cure for being human.

Frédéric Moffett is interested in revolt. Not necessarily political revolution, but revolt as Julia Kristeva defines it as “a permanent state of questioning, transformation, [and] an endless probing of appearances. His film Jean Genet in Chicago, which he refers to as a ‘thief video’, is a poignant revolt against apathy and malaise in contemporary American culture. Saturated with appropriated quotations from literature, media archives, and Genet’s memoirs, the film transforms anecdotes of his historical visit to Chicago in 1968 to cover the National Democratic Convention into a reflection on political decay, social dislocation, and the roots of radical queer consciousness.

One the most contentious and openly queer scenes in Jean Genet in Chicago was clearly ‘thieved’ from Genet’s own film Un Chant d’Amour. In Moffett’s film, Genet is repeatedly distracted from praising the successes of America’s radical movements by sexually objectifying the Chicago Police. This contention between political values and sexual desires grips the heart of Un Chant d’Amour. Its narrative is set in a French prison where a guard takes pleasure in observing two prisoners act out their unrequited love through masturbatory gestures on either side of the brick wall that separates them. Shot in 1950, this erotic visual poem was clearly influenced by Genet’s African military service, which no doubt ignited a psychic struggle between his attraction and repulsion to state power and force. Frédéric Moffett’s interest in revolt is no doubt inspired by Genet’s, and it is an honor to show these two poignant films together.